Supporting the development of learner autonomy through textbooks

Developing Learner Autonomy (LA) has become one of the curriculum objectives in many educational settings, including Indonesia's newest west national curriculum, the K13. Course textbooks are crucial parts of the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) curriculum and serve to enact the curriculum aspiration at the classroom levels. Even though textbooks are sometimes seen as imposing one particular approach to learning, many EFL teachers rely on textbooks. At the same time, textbooks frequently incorporate and reflect changes in the curriculum. This study adopts a predictive evaluation approach to evaluate English LanguageTeaching (ELT) course textbooks used in Indonesian schools of their potential values to support the development of LA. Five ELT textbooks are selected, one is the prescribed textbook published by the Ministry of Education and Culture (MoEC), two textbooks published by local publishers, and two international publishers. Reinders' (2010) stages of self directed learning are used to investigate the evidence of LA support at different stages of learning. Additionally, Nunan's (1996) levels of implementing learner autonomy are employed to examine the degree of supports that each task has for developing LA. The evaluation of the five textbooks shows that the current ELT textbooks have not provided enough tasks that support LA. Course textbooks that are designed specifically to enact the new curriculum are constrained by the imposed learning structure. The findings suggest that textbook writers need to include learning tasks that cater to different stages of self-directed learning to actualize the curricular goal of cultivating autonomous learners.